INTERVIEW WITH SAM LEE
JF: You’ve described folk song as a lost hieroglyphic, and Stanley Robertson talks of the maisie or dwende as calling in the sound and song from the ancestral realms. In this sense, the oral tradition is a language of connection, a codex that activates a deep wisdom. How do you see sound as a conduit to communicate – not just with our ancestors, but also with the more-than-human?
SL: I always feel like I'm operating as a singer and as a sound-maker, and more importantly as a listener in this very, very thin realm of audible sound. I’m sort of splashing around in the shallows, always aware that there are a much bigger set of frequencies. When one is making music, when one is singing, humming, toning, it is a kind of enchanting with nature and a dialling into the frequencies that help us to tune ourselves. Nightingale song is audible and experienceable on a very human level; while we’re not calibrated to receive other sub-audible vibrations, it upholds dialling in and sensing those subtle frequencies
.
JF: Silence or deep listening is the feminine principle of receiving within nature that we have lost much of, being so caught up in the act of doing and making. What is silence for you?
SL: Silence is a complicated word because it rarely appears in nature. If you get your ears in close enough, in reality, everything is still making some sort of noise. For instance, one of my favourite sounds is a phenomenon that happens in the spring under certain types of trees, mostly oak and hornbeam. It’s called frass – the deposit of both the sugary secretions from insects and the leafy material that’s cut out by ants and little invertebrates that are chewing and chomping on fresh leaves. As they’re eating, bits of the leaf are breaking off and dropping down. So you get this rain-like sound. And often if I’m sleeping out under a tree in springtime, I’ll wake up in the morning and there’ll be like this tiny confetti of little circles of leaves. And the sound also on a tent on canvas is this kind of pitter-patter, like a mist.
JF: You talk about your process as a way of dissolving the space between nature and the human, or the illusion of there being a separation in the first place. In Jungian alchemical psychology, the process of dissolution is the removing or dissolving of prejudices, rigidity of thinking and outdated belief systems. How can we position ourselves to listen better, and to dissolve?
SL: By turning up and embracing that dissolution, we can heal that space. To listen compassionately without prejudice, towards ourselves as well, is very purifying. Certainly with the nightingales, it’s a very purifying space – and for that reason, we start to find joyful excitement and a sense of wonder in that quietness as things emerge. It’s a real filtration that happens. It is a dissolvement, but it’s also a filtration. And suddenly that becomes, like the psychedelic experience, a stripping away of the bit of the brain that’s dialling in the noise. Nightingales’ song can be like that – it’s overpowering, in a way.
JF: You call nightingales the head surgeons, which feels fitting to their roles as night watchmen, heralding the spring, their song like a light getting in through the cracks in the darkness to light the path ahead for the forest to emerge from the winter.
SL: They are leading you across the threshold. The experience of singing with the nightingales is an initiation into the year ahead. Being out there with the birds, it’s like the birthright of the year – like being in the maternity ward as nature is born, as all is revealed about which plants are going to be where and when. After the harvest, facing towards the winter, it is like a hospice – everything is turning in, waiting to be released. It’s such a profound experience at the beginning; it makes you feel immensely wedded to, and invested in, nature for the rest of the year.
JF: Can you describe the experience and the journey of Singing With Nightingales?
SL: We are waiting and then as it comes into kind of audible reach, the calling. You’re never quite sure whether they’re going to sing or not, especially the first in the season, or which ones have survived and returned. And then, as the song gets louder and louder and louder, as we get closer and closer, it’s like falling down the rabbit hole slowly. It pulls you in, lures you and the song gets louder, the pull gets stronger. And I become like a sort of hound dog that’s got blood in the nose: I want to get closer, just to feel the vibration. And then there’s that point where the song is so close, you’re so close to the bird that your ears are throbbing and you feel it. You feel the vibration of the bird in your chest, in your cavities, but particularly your eardrums – that as he does a certain song gesture, it creates this pulsating in your ear, like somebody’s slapping your ear with their hand. It’s so profound. It is a really lovely place of intensity. In the pauses, that’s where the silence is, but they’re never long enough to allow the full monotony of thought to flood back in. There is a rhythm of intensity and release.
JF: Nightingales have an association with grief, the pain of loss or unrequited love, and the unbearable weight of longing. Is this reflected in the song of the unpaired males as the season comes to an end?
SL: The song itself remains the same, but the intensity of it, the commitment to it, changes. I find that really hard when a bird has stopped singing and you know he’s there because they don’t move, you know exactly which tree they’re in. They become still, like it’s not worth extending their energy anymore.
JF: In the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the nightingale, the bird is replaced by an automaton that sings to the emperor at night until it fails and they beg the true nightingale to return. Already, robotic bees are being developed to pollinate crops, as is often the nature of science to invent a replacement rather than remedy the existing system. Nightingale extinction is a symptom of a compromised system – how can we save what we have?
SL: We are in a state of palliative care with the nightingales. I believe they will be extinct within the next 35 years. With each drought, it is more and more uncertain how many of them will return each spring. It’s not just a problem as they head south; there is a real blindness or deafness to what is happening here, to the levels of deforestation in the UK. Singing with the nightingales is a momentary insight into the extraordinary web around us. I am reminded of this when I walk through the blackthorn area – my face gets covered with silk from insects, the air is saturated, and it just feels like that visceral thing about nature being everywhere and all around us and in our faces. I am met with real gratitude when I am tickled by these webs, reminded of how alive the land is, and sadness at the idea of its emptiness. Being reminded of such things helps us to reframe our actions, our priorities and our footprints as guardians of these lands.
JF: The decline of the nightingale as a species expresses this deep sense of loss and grief, the very same these birds represent. Environmental researcher and philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ – from solace (comfort) and algia (pain) – to describe the distress caused by environmental change and our endemic sense of place being violated. Its remedy he describes as ‘soliphilia’ – a unity of interests, a love of the whole Earth and political solidarity. How can we foster a more productive, ‘soliphilic’ nature and restore the symbiotic relationship we have lost?
SL: I love that. Absolutely, a reclaiming of our place within the natural order and a sense of deep rootedness to the Earth, not just grieving a sense of loss. I think that’s the beauty of the nightingale – and being in that bit of land with them is when people find a bit of landscape that’s just sort of penetrated into their heart and they feel very connected to it. And that’s what we need to be fostering in our society – that sense of the polyamory of landscapes.
JF: You’ve described folk song as a lost hieroglyphic, and Stanley Robertson talks of the maisie or dwende as calling in the sound and song from the ancestral realms. In this sense, the oral tradition is a language of connection, a codex that activates a deep wisdom. How do you see sound as a conduit to communicate – not just with our ancestors, but also with the more-than-human?
SL: I always feel like I'm operating as a singer and as a sound-maker, and more importantly as a listener in this very, very thin realm of audible sound. I’m sort of splashing around in the shallows, always aware that there are a much bigger set of frequencies. When one is making music, when one is singing, humming, toning, it is a kind of enchanting with nature and a dialling into the frequencies that help us to tune ourselves. Nightingale song is audible and experienceable on a very human level; while we’re not calibrated to receive other sub-audible vibrations, it upholds dialling in and sensing those subtle frequencies
.
JF: Silence or deep listening is the feminine principle of receiving within nature that we have lost much of, being so caught up in the act of doing and making. What is silence for you?
SL: Silence is a complicated word because it rarely appears in nature. If you get your ears in close enough, in reality, everything is still making some sort of noise. For instance, one of my favourite sounds is a phenomenon that happens in the spring under certain types of trees, mostly oak and hornbeam. It’s called frass – the deposit of both the sugary secretions from insects and the leafy material that’s cut out by ants and little invertebrates that are chewing and chomping on fresh leaves. As they’re eating, bits of the leaf are breaking off and dropping down. So you get this rain-like sound. And often if I’m sleeping out under a tree in springtime, I’ll wake up in the morning and there’ll be like this tiny confetti of little circles of leaves. And the sound also on a tent on canvas is this kind of pitter-patter, like a mist.
JF: You talk about your process as a way of dissolving the space between nature and the human, or the illusion of there being a separation in the first place. In Jungian alchemical psychology, the process of dissolution is the removing or dissolving of prejudices, rigidity of thinking and outdated belief systems. How can we position ourselves to listen better, and to dissolve?
SL: By turning up and embracing that dissolution, we can heal that space. To listen compassionately without prejudice, towards ourselves as well, is very purifying. Certainly with the nightingales, it’s a very purifying space – and for that reason, we start to find joyful excitement and a sense of wonder in that quietness as things emerge. It’s a real filtration that happens. It is a dissolvement, but it’s also a filtration. And suddenly that becomes, like the psychedelic experience, a stripping away of the bit of the brain that’s dialling in the noise. Nightingales’ song can be like that – it’s overpowering, in a way.
JF: You call nightingales the head surgeons, which feels fitting to their roles as night watchmen, heralding the spring, their song like a light getting in through the cracks in the darkness to light the path ahead for the forest to emerge from the winter.
SL: They are leading you across the threshold. The experience of singing with the nightingales is an initiation into the year ahead. Being out there with the birds, it’s like the birthright of the year – like being in the maternity ward as nature is born, as all is revealed about which plants are going to be where and when. After the harvest, facing towards the winter, it is like a hospice – everything is turning in, waiting to be released. It’s such a profound experience at the beginning; it makes you feel immensely wedded to, and invested in, nature for the rest of the year.
JF: Can you describe the experience and the journey of Singing With Nightingales?
SL: We are waiting and then as it comes into kind of audible reach, the calling. You’re never quite sure whether they’re going to sing or not, especially the first in the season, or which ones have survived and returned. And then, as the song gets louder and louder and louder, as we get closer and closer, it’s like falling down the rabbit hole slowly. It pulls you in, lures you and the song gets louder, the pull gets stronger. And I become like a sort of hound dog that’s got blood in the nose: I want to get closer, just to feel the vibration. And then there’s that point where the song is so close, you’re so close to the bird that your ears are throbbing and you feel it. You feel the vibration of the bird in your chest, in your cavities, but particularly your eardrums – that as he does a certain song gesture, it creates this pulsating in your ear, like somebody’s slapping your ear with their hand. It’s so profound. It is a really lovely place of intensity. In the pauses, that’s where the silence is, but they’re never long enough to allow the full monotony of thought to flood back in. There is a rhythm of intensity and release.
JF: Nightingales have an association with grief, the pain of loss or unrequited love, and the unbearable weight of longing. Is this reflected in the song of the unpaired males as the season comes to an end?
SL: The song itself remains the same, but the intensity of it, the commitment to it, changes. I find that really hard when a bird has stopped singing and you know he’s there because they don’t move, you know exactly which tree they’re in. They become still, like it’s not worth extending their energy anymore.
JF: In the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the nightingale, the bird is replaced by an automaton that sings to the emperor at night until it fails and they beg the true nightingale to return. Already, robotic bees are being developed to pollinate crops, as is often the nature of science to invent a replacement rather than remedy the existing system. Nightingale extinction is a symptom of a compromised system – how can we save what we have?
SL: We are in a state of palliative care with the nightingales. I believe they will be extinct within the next 35 years. With each drought, it is more and more uncertain how many of them will return each spring. It’s not just a problem as they head south; there is a real blindness or deafness to what is happening here, to the levels of deforestation in the UK. Singing with the nightingales is a momentary insight into the extraordinary web around us. I am reminded of this when I walk through the blackthorn area – my face gets covered with silk from insects, the air is saturated, and it just feels like that visceral thing about nature being everywhere and all around us and in our faces. I am met with real gratitude when I am tickled by these webs, reminded of how alive the land is, and sadness at the idea of its emptiness. Being reminded of such things helps us to reframe our actions, our priorities and our footprints as guardians of these lands.
JF: The decline of the nightingale as a species expresses this deep sense of loss and grief, the very same these birds represent. Environmental researcher and philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ – from solace (comfort) and algia (pain) – to describe the distress caused by environmental change and our endemic sense of place being violated. Its remedy he describes as ‘soliphilia’ – a unity of interests, a love of the whole Earth and political solidarity. How can we foster a more productive, ‘soliphilic’ nature and restore the symbiotic relationship we have lost?
SL: I love that. Absolutely, a reclaiming of our place within the natural order and a sense of deep rootedness to the Earth, not just grieving a sense of loss. I think that’s the beauty of the nightingale – and being in that bit of land with them is when people find a bit of landscape that’s just sort of penetrated into their heart and they feel very connected to it. And that’s what we need to be fostering in our society – that sense of the polyamory of landscapes.
Sam Lee is a Mercury Prize nominated folk singer, writer, conservationist, song collector, award-winning promoter, broadcaster and activist. Sam is the founder of Singing with the Nightingales.
INTERVIEW WITH SAM LEE
JF: You’ve described folk song as a lost hieroglyphic, and Stanley Robertson talks of the maisie or dwende as calling in the sound and song from the ancestral realms. In this sense, the oral tradition is a language of connection, a codex that activates a deep wisdom. How do you see sound as a conduit to communicate – not just with our ancestors, but also with the more-than-human?
SL: I always feel like I'm operating as a singer and as a sound-maker, and more importantly as a listener in this very, very thin realm of audible sound. I’m sort of splashing around in the shallows, always aware that there are a much bigger set of frequencies. When one is making music, when one is singing, humming, toning, it is a kind of enchanting with nature and a dialling into the frequencies that help us to tune ourselves. Nightingale song is audible and experienceable on a very human level; while we’re not calibrated to receive other sub-audible vibrations, it upholds dialling in and sensing those subtle frequencies
.
JF: Silence or deep listening is the feminine principle of receiving within nature that we have lost much of, being so caught up in the act of doing and making. What is silence for you?
SL: Silence is a complicated word because it rarely appears in nature. If you get your ears in close enough, in reality, everything is still making some sort of noise. For instance, one of my favourite sounds is a phenomenon that happens in the spring under certain types of trees, mostly oak and hornbeam. It’s called frass – the deposit of both the sugary secretions from insects and the leafy material that’s cut out by ants and little invertebrates that are chewing and chomping on fresh leaves. As they’re eating, bits of the leaf are breaking off and dropping down. So you get this rain-like sound. And often if I’m sleeping out under a tree in springtime, I’ll wake up in the morning and there’ll be like this tiny confetti of little circles of leaves. And the sound also on a tent on canvas is this kind of pitter-patter, like a mist.
JF: You talk about your process as a way of dissolving the space between nature and the human, or the illusion of there being a separation in the first place. In Jungian alchemical psychology, the process of dissolution is the removing or dissolving of prejudices, rigidity of thinking and outdated belief systems. How can we position ourselves to listen better, and to dissolve?
SL: By turning up and embracing that dissolution, we can heal that space. To listen compassionately without prejudice, towards ourselves as well, is very purifying. Certainly with the nightingales, it’s a very purifying space – and for that reason, we start to find joyful excitement and a sense of wonder in that quietness as things emerge. It’s a real filtration that happens. It is a dissolvement, but it’s also a filtration. And suddenly that becomes, like the psychedelic experience, a stripping away of the bit of the brain that’s dialling in the noise. Nightingales’ song can be like that – it’s overpowering, in a way.
JF: You call nightingales the head surgeons, which feels fitting to their roles as night watchmen, heralding the spring, their song like a light getting in through the cracks in the darkness to light the path ahead for the forest to emerge from the winter.
SL: They are leading you across the threshold. The experience of singing with the nightingales is an initiation into the year ahead. Being out there with the birds, it’s like the birthright of the year – like being in the maternity ward as nature is born, as all is revealed about which plants are going to be where and when. After the harvest, facing towards the winter, it is like a hospice – everything is turning in, waiting to be released. It’s such a profound experience at the beginning; it makes you feel immensely wedded to, and invested in, nature for the rest of the year.
JF: Can you describe the experience and the journey of Singing With Nightingales?
SL: We are waiting and then as it comes into kind of audible reach, the calling. You’re never quite sure whether they’re going to sing or not, especially the first in the season, or which ones have survived and returned. And then, as the song gets louder and louder and louder, as we get closer and closer, it’s like falling down the rabbit hole slowly. It pulls you in, lures you and the song gets louder, the pull gets stronger. And I become like a sort of hound dog that’s got blood in the nose: I want to get closer, just to feel the vibration. And then there’s that point where the song is so close, you’re so close to the bird that your ears are throbbing and you feel it. You feel the vibration of the bird in your chest, in your cavities, but particularly your eardrums – that as he does a certain song gesture, it creates this pulsating in your ear, like somebody’s slapping your ear with their hand. It’s so profound. It is a really lovely place of intensity. In the pauses, that’s where the silence is, but they’re never long enough to allow the full monotony of thought to flood back in. There is a rhythm of intensity and release.
JF: Nightingales have an association with grief, the pain of loss or unrequited love, and the unbearable weight of longing. Is this reflected in the song of the unpaired males as the season comes to an end?
SL: The song itself remains the same, but the intensity of it, the commitment to it, changes. I find that really hard when a bird has stopped singing and you know he’s there because they don’t move, you know exactly which tree they’re in. They become still, like it’s not worth extending their energy anymore.
JF: In the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the nightingale, the bird is replaced by an automaton that sings to the emperor at night until it fails and they beg the true nightingale to return. Already, robotic bees are being developed to pollinate crops, as is often the nature of science to invent a replacement rather than remedy the existing system. Nightingale extinction is a symptom of a compromised system – how can we save what we have?
SL: We are in a state of palliative care with the nightingales. I believe they will be extinct within the next 35 years. With each drought, it is more and more uncertain how many of them will return each spring. It’s not just a problem as they head south; there is a real blindness or deafness to what is happening here, to the levels of deforestation in the UK. Singing with the nightingales is a momentary insight into the extraordinary web around us. I am reminded of this when I walk through the blackthorn area – my face gets covered with silk from insects, the air is saturated, and it just feels like that visceral thing about nature being everywhere and all around us and in our faces. I am met with real gratitude when I am tickled by these webs, reminded of how alive the land is, and sadness at the idea of its emptiness. Being reminded of such things helps us to reframe our actions, our priorities and our footprints as guardians of these lands.
JF: The decline of the nightingale as a species expresses this deep sense of loss and grief, the very same these birds represent. Environmental researcher and philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ – from solace (comfort) and algia (pain) – to describe the distress caused by environmental change and our endemic sense of place being violated. Its remedy he describes as ‘soliphilia’ – a unity of interests, a love of the whole Earth and political solidarity. How can we foster a more productive, ‘soliphilic’ nature and restore the symbiotic relationship we have lost?
SL: I love that. Absolutely, a reclaiming of our place within the natural order and a sense of deep rootedness to the Earth, not just grieving a sense of loss. I think that’s the beauty of the nightingale – and being in that bit of land with them is when people find a bit of landscape that’s just sort of penetrated into their heart and they feel very connected to it. And that’s what we need to be fostering in our society – that sense of the polyamory of landscapes.
JF: You’ve described folk song as a lost hieroglyphic, and Stanley Robertson talks of the maisie or dwende as calling in the sound and song from the ancestral realms. In this sense, the oral tradition is a language of connection, a codex that activates a deep wisdom. How do you see sound as a conduit to communicate – not just with our ancestors, but also with the more-than-human?
SL: I always feel like I'm operating as a singer and as a sound-maker, and more importantly as a listener in this very, very thin realm of audible sound. I’m sort of splashing around in the shallows, always aware that there are a much bigger set of frequencies. When one is making music, when one is singing, humming, toning, it is a kind of enchanting with nature and a dialling into the frequencies that help us to tune ourselves. Nightingale song is audible and experienceable on a very human level; while we’re not calibrated to receive other sub-audible vibrations, it upholds dialling in and sensing those subtle frequencies
.
JF: Silence or deep listening is the feminine principle of receiving within nature that we have lost much of, being so caught up in the act of doing and making. What is silence for you?
SL: Silence is a complicated word because it rarely appears in nature. If you get your ears in close enough, in reality, everything is still making some sort of noise. For instance, one of my favourite sounds is a phenomenon that happens in the spring under certain types of trees, mostly oak and hornbeam. It’s called frass – the deposit of both the sugary secretions from insects and the leafy material that’s cut out by ants and little invertebrates that are chewing and chomping on fresh leaves. As they’re eating, bits of the leaf are breaking off and dropping down. So you get this rain-like sound. And often if I’m sleeping out under a tree in springtime, I’ll wake up in the morning and there’ll be like this tiny confetti of little circles of leaves. And the sound also on a tent on canvas is this kind of pitter-patter, like a mist.
JF: You talk about your process as a way of dissolving the space between nature and the human, or the illusion of there being a separation in the first place. In Jungian alchemical psychology, the process of dissolution is the removing or dissolving of prejudices, rigidity of thinking and outdated belief systems. How can we position ourselves to listen better, and to dissolve?
SL: By turning up and embracing that dissolution, we can heal that space. To listen compassionately without prejudice, towards ourselves as well, is very purifying. Certainly with the nightingales, it’s a very purifying space – and for that reason, we start to find joyful excitement and a sense of wonder in that quietness as things emerge. It’s a real filtration that happens. It is a dissolvement, but it’s also a filtration. And suddenly that becomes, like the psychedelic experience, a stripping away of the bit of the brain that’s dialling in the noise. Nightingales’ song can be like that – it’s overpowering, in a way.
JF: You call nightingales the head surgeons, which feels fitting to their roles as night watchmen, heralding the spring, their song like a light getting in through the cracks in the darkness to light the path ahead for the forest to emerge from the winter.
SL: They are leading you across the threshold. The experience of singing with the nightingales is an initiation into the year ahead. Being out there with the birds, it’s like the birthright of the year – like being in the maternity ward as nature is born, as all is revealed about which plants are going to be where and when. After the harvest, facing towards the winter, it is like a hospice – everything is turning in, waiting to be released. It’s such a profound experience at the beginning; it makes you feel immensely wedded to, and invested in, nature for the rest of the year.
JF: Can you describe the experience and the journey of Singing With Nightingales?
SL: We are waiting and then as it comes into kind of audible reach, the calling. You’re never quite sure whether they’re going to sing or not, especially the first in the season, or which ones have survived and returned. And then, as the song gets louder and louder and louder, as we get closer and closer, it’s like falling down the rabbit hole slowly. It pulls you in, lures you and the song gets louder, the pull gets stronger. And I become like a sort of hound dog that’s got blood in the nose: I want to get closer, just to feel the vibration. And then there’s that point where the song is so close, you’re so close to the bird that your ears are throbbing and you feel it. You feel the vibration of the bird in your chest, in your cavities, but particularly your eardrums – that as he does a certain song gesture, it creates this pulsating in your ear, like somebody’s slapping your ear with their hand. It’s so profound. It is a really lovely place of intensity. In the pauses, that’s where the silence is, but they’re never long enough to allow the full monotony of thought to flood back in. There is a rhythm of intensity and release.
JF: Nightingales have an association with grief, the pain of loss or unrequited love, and the unbearable weight of longing. Is this reflected in the song of the unpaired males as the season comes to an end?
SL: The song itself remains the same, but the intensity of it, the commitment to it, changes. I find that really hard when a bird has stopped singing and you know he’s there because they don’t move, you know exactly which tree they’re in. They become still, like it’s not worth extending their energy anymore.
JF: In the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the nightingale, the bird is replaced by an automaton that sings to the emperor at night until it fails and they beg the true nightingale to return. Already, robotic bees are being developed to pollinate crops, as is often the nature of science to invent a replacement rather than remedy the existing system. Nightingale extinction is a symptom of a compromised system – how can we save what we have?
SL: We are in a state of palliative care with the nightingales. I believe they will be extinct within the next 35 years. With each drought, it is more and more uncertain how many of them will return each spring. It’s not just a problem as they head south; there is a real blindness or deafness to what is happening here, to the levels of deforestation in the UK. Singing with the nightingales is a momentary insight into the extraordinary web around us. I am reminded of this when I walk through the blackthorn area – my face gets covered with silk from insects, the air is saturated, and it just feels like that visceral thing about nature being everywhere and all around us and in our faces. I am met with real gratitude when I am tickled by these webs, reminded of how alive the land is, and sadness at the idea of its emptiness. Being reminded of such things helps us to reframe our actions, our priorities and our footprints as guardians of these lands.
JF: The decline of the nightingale as a species expresses this deep sense of loss and grief, the very same these birds represent. Environmental researcher and philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ – from solace (comfort) and algia (pain) – to describe the distress caused by environmental change and our endemic sense of place being violated. Its remedy he describes as ‘soliphilia’ – a unity of interests, a love of the whole Earth and political solidarity. How can we foster a more productive, ‘soliphilic’ nature and restore the symbiotic relationship we have lost?
SL: I love that. Absolutely, a reclaiming of our place within the natural order and a sense of deep rootedness to the Earth, not just grieving a sense of loss. I think that’s the beauty of the nightingale – and being in that bit of land with them is when people find a bit of landscape that’s just sort of penetrated into their heart and they feel very connected to it. And that’s what we need to be fostering in our society – that sense of the polyamory of landscapes.
Sam Lee is a Mercury Prize nominated folk singer, writer, conservationist, song collector, award-winning promoter, broadcaster and activist. Sam is the founder of Singing with the Nightingales.
INTERVIEW WITH SAM LEE
JF: You’ve described folk song as a lost hieroglyphic, and Stanley Robertson talks of the maisie or dwende as calling in the sound and song from the ancestral realms. In this sense, the oral tradition is a language of connection, a codex that activates a deep wisdom. How do you see sound as a conduit to communicate – not just with our ancestors, but also with the more-than-human?
SL: I always feel like I'm operating as a singer and as a sound-maker, and more importantly as a listener in this very, very thin realm of audible sound. I’m sort of splashing around in the shallows, always aware that there are a much bigger set of frequencies. When one is making music, when one is singing, humming, toning, it is a kind of enchanting with nature and a dialling into the frequencies that help us to tune ourselves. Nightingale song is audible and experienceable on a very human level; while we’re not calibrated to receive other sub-audible vibrations, it upholds dialling in and sensing those subtle frequencies
.
JF: Silence or deep listening is the feminine principle of receiving within nature that we have lost much of, being so caught up in the act of doing and making. What is silence for you?
SL: Silence is a complicated word because it rarely appears in nature. If you get your ears in close enough, in reality, everything is still making some sort of noise. For instance, one of my favourite sounds is a phenomenon that happens in the spring under certain types of trees, mostly oak and hornbeam. It’s called frass – the deposit of both the sugary secretions from insects and the leafy material that’s cut out by ants and little invertebrates that are chewing and chomping on fresh leaves. As they’re eating, bits of the leaf are breaking off and dropping down. So you get this rain-like sound. And often if I’m sleeping out under a tree in springtime, I’ll wake up in the morning and there’ll be like this tiny confetti of little circles of leaves. And the sound also on a tent on canvas is this kind of pitter-patter, like a mist.
JF: You talk about your process as a way of dissolving the space between nature and the human, or the illusion of there being a separation in the first place. In Jungian alchemical psychology, the process of dissolution is the removing or dissolving of prejudices, rigidity of thinking and outdated belief systems. How can we position ourselves to listen better, and to dissolve?
SL: By turning up and embracing that dissolution, we can heal that space. To listen compassionately without prejudice, towards ourselves as well, is very purifying. Certainly with the nightingales, it’s a very purifying space – and for that reason, we start to find joyful excitement and a sense of wonder in that quietness as things emerge. It’s a real filtration that happens. It is a dissolvement, but it’s also a filtration. And suddenly that becomes, like the psychedelic experience, a stripping away of the bit of the brain that’s dialling in the noise. Nightingales’ song can be like that – it’s overpowering, in a way.
JF: You call nightingales the head surgeons, which feels fitting to their roles as night watchmen, heralding the spring, their song like a light getting in through the cracks in the darkness to light the path ahead for the forest to emerge from the winter.
SL: They are leading you across the threshold. The experience of singing with the nightingales is an initiation into the year ahead. Being out there with the birds, it’s like the birthright of the year – like being in the maternity ward as nature is born, as all is revealed about which plants are going to be where and when. After the harvest, facing towards the winter, it is like a hospice – everything is turning in, waiting to be released. It’s such a profound experience at the beginning; it makes you feel immensely wedded to, and invested in, nature for the rest of the year.
JF: Can you describe the experience and the journey of Singing With Nightingales?
SL: We are waiting and then as it comes into kind of audible reach, the calling. You’re never quite sure whether they’re going to sing or not, especially the first in the season, or which ones have survived and returned. And then, as the song gets louder and louder and louder, as we get closer and closer, it’s like falling down the rabbit hole slowly. It pulls you in, lures you and the song gets louder, the pull gets stronger. And I become like a sort of hound dog that’s got blood in the nose: I want to get closer, just to feel the vibration. And then there’s that point where the song is so close, you’re so close to the bird that your ears are throbbing and you feel it. You feel the vibration of the bird in your chest, in your cavities, but particularly your eardrums – that as he does a certain song gesture, it creates this pulsating in your ear, like somebody’s slapping your ear with their hand. It’s so profound. It is a really lovely place of intensity. In the pauses, that’s where the silence is, but they’re never long enough to allow the full monotony of thought to flood back in. There is a rhythm of intensity and release.
JF: Nightingales have an association with grief, the pain of loss or unrequited love, and the unbearable weight of longing. Is this reflected in the song of the unpaired males as the season comes to an end?
SL: The song itself remains the same, but the intensity of it, the commitment to it, changes. I find that really hard when a bird has stopped singing and you know he’s there because they don’t move, you know exactly which tree they’re in. They become still, like it’s not worth extending their energy anymore.
JF: In the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the nightingale, the bird is replaced by an automaton that sings to the emperor at night until it fails and they beg the true nightingale to return. Already, robotic bees are being developed to pollinate crops, as is often the nature of science to invent a replacement rather than remedy the existing system. Nightingale extinction is a symptom of a compromised system – how can we save what we have?
SL: We are in a state of palliative care with the nightingales. I believe they will be extinct within the next 35 years. With each drought, it is more and more uncertain how many of them will return each spring. It’s not just a problem as they head south; there is a real blindness or deafness to what is happening here, to the levels of deforestation in the UK. Singing with the nightingales is a momentary insight into the extraordinary web around us. I am reminded of this when I walk through the blackthorn area – my face gets covered with silk from insects, the air is saturated, and it just feels like that visceral thing about nature being everywhere and all around us and in our faces. I am met with real gratitude when I am tickled by these webs, reminded of how alive the land is, and sadness at the idea of its emptiness. Being reminded of such things helps us to reframe our actions, our priorities and our footprints as guardians of these lands.
JF: The decline of the nightingale as a species expresses this deep sense of loss and grief, the very same these birds represent. Environmental researcher and philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ – from solace (comfort) and algia (pain) – to describe the distress caused by environmental change and our endemic sense of place being violated. Its remedy he describes as ‘soliphilia’ – a unity of interests, a love of the whole Earth and political solidarity. How can we foster a more productive, ‘soliphilic’ nature and restore the symbiotic relationship we have lost?
SL: I love that. Absolutely, a reclaiming of our place within the natural order and a sense of deep rootedness to the Earth, not just grieving a sense of loss. I think that’s the beauty of the nightingale – and being in that bit of land with them is when people find a bit of landscape that’s just sort of penetrated into their heart and they feel very connected to it. And that’s what we need to be fostering in our society – that sense of the polyamory of landscapes.
JF: You’ve described folk song as a lost hieroglyphic, and Stanley Robertson talks of the maisie or dwende as calling in the sound and song from the ancestral realms. In this sense, the oral tradition is a language of connection, a codex that activates a deep wisdom. How do you see sound as a conduit to communicate – not just with our ancestors, but also with the more-than-human?
SL: I always feel like I'm operating as a singer and as a sound-maker, and more importantly as a listener in this very, very thin realm of audible sound. I’m sort of splashing around in the shallows, always aware that there are a much bigger set of frequencies. When one is making music, when one is singing, humming, toning, it is a kind of enchanting with nature and a dialling into the frequencies that help us to tune ourselves. Nightingale song is audible and experienceable on a very human level; while we’re not calibrated to receive other sub-audible vibrations, it upholds dialling in and sensing those subtle frequencies
.
JF: Silence or deep listening is the feminine principle of receiving within nature that we have lost much of, being so caught up in the act of doing and making. What is silence for you?
SL: Silence is a complicated word because it rarely appears in nature. If you get your ears in close enough, in reality, everything is still making some sort of noise. For instance, one of my favourite sounds is a phenomenon that happens in the spring under certain types of trees, mostly oak and hornbeam. It’s called frass – the deposit of both the sugary secretions from insects and the leafy material that’s cut out by ants and little invertebrates that are chewing and chomping on fresh leaves. As they’re eating, bits of the leaf are breaking off and dropping down. So you get this rain-like sound. And often if I’m sleeping out under a tree in springtime, I’ll wake up in the morning and there’ll be like this tiny confetti of little circles of leaves. And the sound also on a tent on canvas is this kind of pitter-patter, like a mist.
JF: You talk about your process as a way of dissolving the space between nature and the human, or the illusion of there being a separation in the first place. In Jungian alchemical psychology, the process of dissolution is the removing or dissolving of prejudices, rigidity of thinking and outdated belief systems. How can we position ourselves to listen better, and to dissolve?
SL: By turning up and embracing that dissolution, we can heal that space. To listen compassionately without prejudice, towards ourselves as well, is very purifying. Certainly with the nightingales, it’s a very purifying space – and for that reason, we start to find joyful excitement and a sense of wonder in that quietness as things emerge. It’s a real filtration that happens. It is a dissolvement, but it’s also a filtration. And suddenly that becomes, like the psychedelic experience, a stripping away of the bit of the brain that’s dialling in the noise. Nightingales’ song can be like that – it’s overpowering, in a way.
JF: You call nightingales the head surgeons, which feels fitting to their roles as night watchmen, heralding the spring, their song like a light getting in through the cracks in the darkness to light the path ahead for the forest to emerge from the winter.
SL: They are leading you across the threshold. The experience of singing with the nightingales is an initiation into the year ahead. Being out there with the birds, it’s like the birthright of the year – like being in the maternity ward as nature is born, as all is revealed about which plants are going to be where and when. After the harvest, facing towards the winter, it is like a hospice – everything is turning in, waiting to be released. It’s such a profound experience at the beginning; it makes you feel immensely wedded to, and invested in, nature for the rest of the year.
JF: Can you describe the experience and the journey of Singing With Nightingales?
SL: We are waiting and then as it comes into kind of audible reach, the calling. You’re never quite sure whether they’re going to sing or not, especially the first in the season, or which ones have survived and returned. And then, as the song gets louder and louder and louder, as we get closer and closer, it’s like falling down the rabbit hole slowly. It pulls you in, lures you and the song gets louder, the pull gets stronger. And I become like a sort of hound dog that’s got blood in the nose: I want to get closer, just to feel the vibration. And then there’s that point where the song is so close, you’re so close to the bird that your ears are throbbing and you feel it. You feel the vibration of the bird in your chest, in your cavities, but particularly your eardrums – that as he does a certain song gesture, it creates this pulsating in your ear, like somebody’s slapping your ear with their hand. It’s so profound. It is a really lovely place of intensity. In the pauses, that’s where the silence is, but they’re never long enough to allow the full monotony of thought to flood back in. There is a rhythm of intensity and release.
JF: Nightingales have an association with grief, the pain of loss or unrequited love, and the unbearable weight of longing. Is this reflected in the song of the unpaired males as the season comes to an end?
SL: The song itself remains the same, but the intensity of it, the commitment to it, changes. I find that really hard when a bird has stopped singing and you know he’s there because they don’t move, you know exactly which tree they’re in. They become still, like it’s not worth extending their energy anymore.
JF: In the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the nightingale, the bird is replaced by an automaton that sings to the emperor at night until it fails and they beg the true nightingale to return. Already, robotic bees are being developed to pollinate crops, as is often the nature of science to invent a replacement rather than remedy the existing system. Nightingale extinction is a symptom of a compromised system – how can we save what we have?
SL: We are in a state of palliative care with the nightingales. I believe they will be extinct within the next 35 years. With each drought, it is more and more uncertain how many of them will return each spring. It’s not just a problem as they head south; there is a real blindness or deafness to what is happening here, to the levels of deforestation in the UK. Singing with the nightingales is a momentary insight into the extraordinary web around us. I am reminded of this when I walk through the blackthorn area – my face gets covered with silk from insects, the air is saturated, and it just feels like that visceral thing about nature being everywhere and all around us and in our faces. I am met with real gratitude when I am tickled by these webs, reminded of how alive the land is, and sadness at the idea of its emptiness. Being reminded of such things helps us to reframe our actions, our priorities and our footprints as guardians of these lands.
JF: The decline of the nightingale as a species expresses this deep sense of loss and grief, the very same these birds represent. Environmental researcher and philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ – from solace (comfort) and algia (pain) – to describe the distress caused by environmental change and our endemic sense of place being violated. Its remedy he describes as ‘soliphilia’ – a unity of interests, a love of the whole Earth and political solidarity. How can we foster a more productive, ‘soliphilic’ nature and restore the symbiotic relationship we have lost?
SL: I love that. Absolutely, a reclaiming of our place within the natural order and a sense of deep rootedness to the Earth, not just grieving a sense of loss. I think that’s the beauty of the nightingale – and being in that bit of land with them is when people find a bit of landscape that’s just sort of penetrated into their heart and they feel very connected to it. And that’s what we need to be fostering in our society – that sense of the polyamory of landscapes.
Sam Lee is a Mercury Prize nominated folk singer, writer, conservationist, song collector, award-winning promoter, broadcaster and activist. Sam is the founder of Singing with the Nightingales.
INTERVIEW WITH SAM LEE
JF: You’ve described folk song as a lost hieroglyphic, and Stanley Robertson talks of the maisie or dwende as calling in the sound and song from the ancestral realms. In this sense, the oral tradition is a language of connection, a codex that activates a deep wisdom. How do you see sound as a conduit to communicate – not just with our ancestors, but also with the more-than-human?
SL: I always feel like I'm operating as a singer and as a sound-maker, and more importantly as a listener in this very, very thin realm of audible sound. I’m sort of splashing around in the shallows, always aware that there are a much bigger set of frequencies. When one is making music, when one is singing, humming, toning, it is a kind of enchanting with nature and a dialling into the frequencies that help us to tune ourselves. Nightingale song is audible and experienceable on a very human level; while we’re not calibrated to receive other sub-audible vibrations, it upholds dialling in and sensing those subtle frequencies
.
JF: Silence or deep listening is the feminine principle of receiving within nature that we have lost much of, being so caught up in the act of doing and making. What is silence for you?
SL: Silence is a complicated word because it rarely appears in nature. If you get your ears in close enough, in reality, everything is still making some sort of noise. For instance, one of my favourite sounds is a phenomenon that happens in the spring under certain types of trees, mostly oak and hornbeam. It’s called frass – the deposit of both the sugary secretions from insects and the leafy material that’s cut out by ants and little invertebrates that are chewing and chomping on fresh leaves. As they’re eating, bits of the leaf are breaking off and dropping down. So you get this rain-like sound. And often if I’m sleeping out under a tree in springtime, I’ll wake up in the morning and there’ll be like this tiny confetti of little circles of leaves. And the sound also on a tent on canvas is this kind of pitter-patter, like a mist.
JF: You talk about your process as a way of dissolving the space between nature and the human, or the illusion of there being a separation in the first place. In Jungian alchemical psychology, the process of dissolution is the removing or dissolving of prejudices, rigidity of thinking and outdated belief systems. How can we position ourselves to listen better, and to dissolve?
SL: By turning up and embracing that dissolution, we can heal that space. To listen compassionately without prejudice, towards ourselves as well, is very purifying. Certainly with the nightingales, it’s a very purifying space – and for that reason, we start to find joyful excitement and a sense of wonder in that quietness as things emerge. It’s a real filtration that happens. It is a dissolvement, but it’s also a filtration. And suddenly that becomes, like the psychedelic experience, a stripping away of the bit of the brain that’s dialling in the noise. Nightingales’ song can be like that – it’s overpowering, in a way.
JF: You call nightingales the head surgeons, which feels fitting to their roles as night watchmen, heralding the spring, their song like a light getting in through the cracks in the darkness to light the path ahead for the forest to emerge from the winter.
SL: They are leading you across the threshold. The experience of singing with the nightingales is an initiation into the year ahead. Being out there with the birds, it’s like the birthright of the year – like being in the maternity ward as nature is born, as all is revealed about which plants are going to be where and when. After the harvest, facing towards the winter, it is like a hospice – everything is turning in, waiting to be released. It’s such a profound experience at the beginning; it makes you feel immensely wedded to, and invested in, nature for the rest of the year.
JF: Can you describe the experience and the journey of Singing With Nightingales?
SL: We are waiting and then as it comes into kind of audible reach, the calling. You’re never quite sure whether they’re going to sing or not, especially the first in the season, or which ones have survived and returned. And then, as the song gets louder and louder and louder, as we get closer and closer, it’s like falling down the rabbit hole slowly. It pulls you in, lures you and the song gets louder, the pull gets stronger. And I become like a sort of hound dog that’s got blood in the nose: I want to get closer, just to feel the vibration. And then there’s that point where the song is so close, you’re so close to the bird that your ears are throbbing and you feel it. You feel the vibration of the bird in your chest, in your cavities, but particularly your eardrums – that as he does a certain song gesture, it creates this pulsating in your ear, like somebody’s slapping your ear with their hand. It’s so profound. It is a really lovely place of intensity. In the pauses, that’s where the silence is, but they’re never long enough to allow the full monotony of thought to flood back in. There is a rhythm of intensity and release.
JF: Nightingales have an association with grief, the pain of loss or unrequited love, and the unbearable weight of longing. Is this reflected in the song of the unpaired males as the season comes to an end?
SL: The song itself remains the same, but the intensity of it, the commitment to it, changes. I find that really hard when a bird has stopped singing and you know he’s there because they don’t move, you know exactly which tree they’re in. They become still, like it’s not worth extending their energy anymore.
JF: In the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the nightingale, the bird is replaced by an automaton that sings to the emperor at night until it fails and they beg the true nightingale to return. Already, robotic bees are being developed to pollinate crops, as is often the nature of science to invent a replacement rather than remedy the existing system. Nightingale extinction is a symptom of a compromised system – how can we save what we have?
SL: We are in a state of palliative care with the nightingales. I believe they will be extinct within the next 35 years. With each drought, it is more and more uncertain how many of them will return each spring. It’s not just a problem as they head south; there is a real blindness or deafness to what is happening here, to the levels of deforestation in the UK. Singing with the nightingales is a momentary insight into the extraordinary web around us. I am reminded of this when I walk through the blackthorn area – my face gets covered with silk from insects, the air is saturated, and it just feels like that visceral thing about nature being everywhere and all around us and in our faces. I am met with real gratitude when I am tickled by these webs, reminded of how alive the land is, and sadness at the idea of its emptiness. Being reminded of such things helps us to reframe our actions, our priorities and our footprints as guardians of these lands.
JF: The decline of the nightingale as a species expresses this deep sense of loss and grief, the very same these birds represent. Environmental researcher and philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ – from solace (comfort) and algia (pain) – to describe the distress caused by environmental change and our endemic sense of place being violated. Its remedy he describes as ‘soliphilia’ – a unity of interests, a love of the whole Earth and political solidarity. How can we foster a more productive, ‘soliphilic’ nature and restore the symbiotic relationship we have lost?
SL: I love that. Absolutely, a reclaiming of our place within the natural order and a sense of deep rootedness to the Earth, not just grieving a sense of loss. I think that’s the beauty of the nightingale – and being in that bit of land with them is when people find a bit of landscape that’s just sort of penetrated into their heart and they feel very connected to it. And that’s what we need to be fostering in our society – that sense of the polyamory of landscapes.
JF: You’ve described folk song as a lost hieroglyphic, and Stanley Robertson talks of the maisie or dwende as calling in the sound and song from the ancestral realms. In this sense, the oral tradition is a language of connection, a codex that activates a deep wisdom. How do you see sound as a conduit to communicate – not just with our ancestors, but also with the more-than-human?
SL: I always feel like I'm operating as a singer and as a sound-maker, and more importantly as a listener in this very, very thin realm of audible sound. I’m sort of splashing around in the shallows, always aware that there are a much bigger set of frequencies. When one is making music, when one is singing, humming, toning, it is a kind of enchanting with nature and a dialling into the frequencies that help us to tune ourselves. Nightingale song is audible and experienceable on a very human level; while we’re not calibrated to receive other sub-audible vibrations, it upholds dialling in and sensing those subtle frequencies
.
JF: Silence or deep listening is the feminine principle of receiving within nature that we have lost much of, being so caught up in the act of doing and making. What is silence for you?
SL: Silence is a complicated word because it rarely appears in nature. If you get your ears in close enough, in reality, everything is still making some sort of noise. For instance, one of my favourite sounds is a phenomenon that happens in the spring under certain types of trees, mostly oak and hornbeam. It’s called frass – the deposit of both the sugary secretions from insects and the leafy material that’s cut out by ants and little invertebrates that are chewing and chomping on fresh leaves. As they’re eating, bits of the leaf are breaking off and dropping down. So you get this rain-like sound. And often if I’m sleeping out under a tree in springtime, I’ll wake up in the morning and there’ll be like this tiny confetti of little circles of leaves. And the sound also on a tent on canvas is this kind of pitter-patter, like a mist.
JF: You talk about your process as a way of dissolving the space between nature and the human, or the illusion of there being a separation in the first place. In Jungian alchemical psychology, the process of dissolution is the removing or dissolving of prejudices, rigidity of thinking and outdated belief systems. How can we position ourselves to listen better, and to dissolve?
SL: By turning up and embracing that dissolution, we can heal that space. To listen compassionately without prejudice, towards ourselves as well, is very purifying. Certainly with the nightingales, it’s a very purifying space – and for that reason, we start to find joyful excitement and a sense of wonder in that quietness as things emerge. It’s a real filtration that happens. It is a dissolvement, but it’s also a filtration. And suddenly that becomes, like the psychedelic experience, a stripping away of the bit of the brain that’s dialling in the noise. Nightingales’ song can be like that – it’s overpowering, in a way.
JF: You call nightingales the head surgeons, which feels fitting to their roles as night watchmen, heralding the spring, their song like a light getting in through the cracks in the darkness to light the path ahead for the forest to emerge from the winter.
SL: They are leading you across the threshold. The experience of singing with the nightingales is an initiation into the year ahead. Being out there with the birds, it’s like the birthright of the year – like being in the maternity ward as nature is born, as all is revealed about which plants are going to be where and when. After the harvest, facing towards the winter, it is like a hospice – everything is turning in, waiting to be released. It’s such a profound experience at the beginning; it makes you feel immensely wedded to, and invested in, nature for the rest of the year.
JF: Can you describe the experience and the journey of Singing With Nightingales?
SL: We are waiting and then as it comes into kind of audible reach, the calling. You’re never quite sure whether they’re going to sing or not, especially the first in the season, or which ones have survived and returned. And then, as the song gets louder and louder and louder, as we get closer and closer, it’s like falling down the rabbit hole slowly. It pulls you in, lures you and the song gets louder, the pull gets stronger. And I become like a sort of hound dog that’s got blood in the nose: I want to get closer, just to feel the vibration. And then there’s that point where the song is so close, you’re so close to the bird that your ears are throbbing and you feel it. You feel the vibration of the bird in your chest, in your cavities, but particularly your eardrums – that as he does a certain song gesture, it creates this pulsating in your ear, like somebody’s slapping your ear with their hand. It’s so profound. It is a really lovely place of intensity. In the pauses, that’s where the silence is, but they’re never long enough to allow the full monotony of thought to flood back in. There is a rhythm of intensity and release.
JF: Nightingales have an association with grief, the pain of loss or unrequited love, and the unbearable weight of longing. Is this reflected in the song of the unpaired males as the season comes to an end?
SL: The song itself remains the same, but the intensity of it, the commitment to it, changes. I find that really hard when a bird has stopped singing and you know he’s there because they don’t move, you know exactly which tree they’re in. They become still, like it’s not worth extending their energy anymore.
JF: In the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the nightingale, the bird is replaced by an automaton that sings to the emperor at night until it fails and they beg the true nightingale to return. Already, robotic bees are being developed to pollinate crops, as is often the nature of science to invent a replacement rather than remedy the existing system. Nightingale extinction is a symptom of a compromised system – how can we save what we have?
SL: We are in a state of palliative care with the nightingales. I believe they will be extinct within the next 35 years. With each drought, it is more and more uncertain how many of them will return each spring. It’s not just a problem as they head south; there is a real blindness or deafness to what is happening here, to the levels of deforestation in the UK. Singing with the nightingales is a momentary insight into the extraordinary web around us. I am reminded of this when I walk through the blackthorn area – my face gets covered with silk from insects, the air is saturated, and it just feels like that visceral thing about nature being everywhere and all around us and in our faces. I am met with real gratitude when I am tickled by these webs, reminded of how alive the land is, and sadness at the idea of its emptiness. Being reminded of such things helps us to reframe our actions, our priorities and our footprints as guardians of these lands.
JF: The decline of the nightingale as a species expresses this deep sense of loss and grief, the very same these birds represent. Environmental researcher and philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ – from solace (comfort) and algia (pain) – to describe the distress caused by environmental change and our endemic sense of place being violated. Its remedy he describes as ‘soliphilia’ – a unity of interests, a love of the whole Earth and political solidarity. How can we foster a more productive, ‘soliphilic’ nature and restore the symbiotic relationship we have lost?
SL: I love that. Absolutely, a reclaiming of our place within the natural order and a sense of deep rootedness to the Earth, not just grieving a sense of loss. I think that’s the beauty of the nightingale – and being in that bit of land with them is when people find a bit of landscape that’s just sort of penetrated into their heart and they feel very connected to it. And that’s what we need to be fostering in our society – that sense of the polyamory of landscapes.
Sam Lee is a Mercury Prize nominated folk singer, writer, conservationist, song collector, award-winning promoter, broadcaster and activist. Sam is the founder of Singing with the Nightingales.